”Comparing prices in online stores is still a burgeoning business” – this is how Arthur Radulescu describes the market in Romania. This observation is based, on the one hand, on his experience as managing director of Asesoft Net, the company that holds the ShopMania.ro portal, and on the other hand, on comparisons with other countries. After being launched in Romania in 2006 and expanded over the last two years to a further 24 countries, ShopMania is among the few major price comparison websites in Romania, which is attracting the most consumers who search for the lowest-priced products and services.

”On the market, there are less than 10 major websites of this kind, but the overall number is in the range of dozens of websites,” says Radulescu. Lately, seeking to speculate the difficult economic situation, which could push people to be more careful about how they spend their money, increasingly more entrepreneurs have tapped into this niche. Examples include ListaPreturi.ro and PricesDB.ro, the latter being a search engine for products of several hundreds of online stores, which uses price as a criterion for the search. The engine was launched at the end of last year following an investment of a little more than 1,000 euros made by Adrian Dimian.

”Romania is a market with a very big potential and which could in fact also be considered a launch pad for the region,” believes Paul Condila, representative of the Romanian version of the GoShopping. com American portal, launched at the end of last month on the Romanian market. GoShopping has prepared a 5 milliondollar (3.75 million-euro) investment, largely funded via bank loans, in order to expand onto the European market, first to Romania, and proceeding with the UK, Germany and France in the second half of this year with. ”In a first stage, the budget allocated for Romania is 600,000 euros, but the company will support the Romanian portal financially for two years, with the investment to probably be recouped in 2011,” explains Paul Condila.

Romania has been chosen because 68% of the portal’s users outside the USA come from Romania, according to Alexa.com statistics, while the second largest market is the UK, which accounts for almost 10% of foreign visitors.